Healers Read online

  He straightened up and tipped his glass at his right-hand man sitting in the front row. “You all know Mbutu Ngasy, too, but for different reasons. He’s the first person most of you talked to when you got here. He’s certainly the one who helped prepare you for your new life in Omaha, and he’s done so much more, things you’ll never know about. He’s been with me – with us – since the very beginning. He deserves our thanks.”

  The applause was louder and longer than it had been for anyone. That made Sherman proud.

  “I don’t want to forget Rebecca Hall,” he said. “Or Mark Stiles. They’ve been part of this since the first days of the Outbreak as well. Rebecca still serves as Dr. Demilio’s right hand, but she has performed miracles of her own: She survived the fall of Cairo. She’s saved hundreds of lives. And Private Stiles, there, has survived … well, far worse. Once again, we wouldn’t be here if not for them.” The first survivors of Omaha had all agreed to keep Mark Stiles’ immunity to Morningstar as much of a secret as they could. They still hadn’t found another living human with a one-hundred-percent immunity to the zombie virus; it had been his blood, along with Demilio’s genius, that had created the vaccine. But telling everyone would make him a strategic target and put everyone around him in danger. Instead, he’d have to settle for being a standard Hero of the Recovery, and he seemed perfectly content with that.

  “I want to acknowledge the presence of Colonel Adan Forrest of the United States Army,” Sherman said, giving a steady gaze to the tall, wiry African American who stood when his name was called. He was not in his formal uniform – Sherman wondered if he even had one – but his BDUs were without a crease and immaculate. He was always immaculate, never a hair out of place. “He joins us tonight as a representative of the President and the United States itself, but he’s more than that: Colonel Forrest saved my life and the lives of every soldier in this room, more than once. We are lucky to call him our friend and our ally.” He raised his glass and the colonel gave him a small, sincere nod. There were drinks all around.

  “And finally,” he said, and raised his glass again. “A toast. A toast to—”

  “Oh, more than one!” a gruff and phlegmy voice called from the second row. Sherman stopped and turned, surprised and amused, as a well-past-middle-aged man with an impressive belly hauled himself to his feet and raised his mug high. He knew the man well and respected him even more, and he knew in an instant that Staff Sergeant Krueger, the finest sharpshooter in the U.S. Armed Forces and another Hero of the Recovery, had found that nearby still as well, and was happily sampling its wares. “A toast!” Krueger crowed. “To Charles Barnard!” He scanned the room critically. “You know who that is? Anybody? I do. Charles Barnard invented chain link fencing, way back in 1844. No, seriously. He did.” A huge grin split the old soldier’s face. “Little did he know, he’d save the world almost one hundred and eighty years later. But he did. And he does. Every day.” Krueger raised his glass even higher, but he turned as he toasted, to face the floor-to-ceiling windows of the huge room, the windows that looked south at the nearby perimeter fence and the devastated city beyond.

  There were shamblers at the outer fence. There were always shamblers there, waiting. Watching. Working their jaws. Clawing at the wire with an endless hunger. A palpable chill, like a wave of ice colder than the Nebraska winter, coursed through the room and every person in it. And Krueger lifted his glass to them.

  “We see you, you sons of bitches,” he said. “We always see you. And we will win.”

  No one said a word as he drank. And every one of them joined him.

  Anna Demilio, of all people, saved the day. The instant they stopped, she stood up suddenly and raised her own glass. “I have a toast as well,” she said, forcing her voice to be almost as big and commanding as General Sherman’s. Her glass came up. “To Dr. Klaus Meyer. Very few of you know his name here. Maybe you should. Doctor Meyer was a physician in Mombasa. He was one of the first to treat an infected human, before any of us knew what this disease was, and how it would change us. He risked his life to save us all. He died in the attempt. But he was the first of – well, of my kind – to fall before Morningstar. To me, he was the first Hero of the Recovery.” She put the glass high over her head and said it strongly: “To Dr. Klaus Meyer!”

  Many voices, old and new, joined in response: “To Dr. Klaus Meyer!” and they drank again.

  There was no need to tell them that Dr. Meyer was also one of the first to rise after death. Or that his body had been transported across oceans and continents, and still remained with them, one of the first of the infected, locked in a room far underground in the CDC facility where Dr. Demilio had created the vaccine. Their hero. Their enemy. And still with them.

  It was Colonel Forrest who rose next. “To the President of the United States,” he said. “To his cabinet. And to the other communities across this country who are rebuilding even now.”

  Sherman rose to join him. “Especially to New Abraham, Kansas,” he said. “Just a few hundred miles from here, and the source of the corn we use for fuel and the eggs we’re using to make vaccines by the gallon. Right, Dr. Demilio?”

  She broke into an open smile. “Any day now,” she said.

  Mark Stiles, silent until this moment, was the last to speak. He stood now, tall and strong, his injuries healed and his secret immunity still secret. “To absent friends!” he said, and raised his glass. “Those still with us, and those we will certainly meet in the next life. To my fellow soldiers, Stone and Allen, at Offutt Air Force Base. To our families. To the other survivors near and far. To Ewan Brewster, who left here to find his own way in the world. Here’s to them all.”

  “HERE’S TO THEM ALL!”

  They toasted together. For a moment the air was filled with the sound of shattering glass as the cups and mugs were thrown together in a final, profound salute.

  Here’s to them all, Sherman thought.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The windows of the new Town Hall were like movie screens, brightly illuminated by the town’s precious solar power and ethanol generators. They were clear and visible to James Finnegan and his covert team, even from concealment, half a mile away in the dying winter light. He watched the meeting from his carefully chosen, shadowy vantage point on a rise well back from the outer perimeter fence and boiled with frustration.

  One well-placed SAW, he thought, aimed at exactly the right angle, and we could take down ninety percent of those losers in one stroke. Just like that. He knew what a bad idea that would be at the moment, but it didn’t stop him from dreaming. Or from cursing the memory of that idiot NSA agent, Sawyer, who had squandered so much of their armament on his mindless vengeance and poorly planned assaults, months earlier. I’m glad you’re dead, he thought bitterly as he lowered his binoculars. I wish you’d died months earlier.

  The radio set on a collapsible desk just a few feet away gave a loud, static-riddled squawk – far too loud, far too long. Finnegan snapped to the side and hissed at Vasquez, the pot-bellied soldier, his comm officer and yet another idiot from the old days. “Shut that up!” he hissed. “Do you want to bring the infected and those idiots down on us?”

  “Sorry!” Vasquez whispered. “Adjusted now! It won’t happen again!”

  “It better not!”

  Vasquez handed him a set of earphones without looking at him. He was literally too afraid to make eye contact. “It’s The Chairman. For you.”

  Finnegan scowled as he took the ‘phones. This was literally the last man on earth he wanted to talk to, but he steeled himself and put one disk to his ear, even as he continued to watch the lights of the distant town hall fade into dusk. “Finnegan here.”

  “What, you don’t even bother with the codes anymore, ‘Kappa Alpha’?” It was the gruff growl of the aging Chairman himself. Finnegan could picture him hunched behind his oversized desk in his office, deep in the bowels
of Mount Weather, playing desperately with his collection of fine pens and dreaming of Doomsday.

  Finnegan shrugged. “Not really. If they’re smart, they already knew we’d be watching. If they’re dumb, they’re too dumb to be listening anyway. Screw it.”

  “Well, screw you, ‘Huck,’” the leader of the RSA snarled. “Just tell me, how did the incursion go?”

  “About what we expected,” Finnegan said, flinching at the insulting nickname that Sawyer had given him, but refusing to let it show in his voice. “Their patrol teams are smart and fast. Their repair teams are even better. If we want to use the infected as a first wave, we’re going to have to figure out something smarter and faster than just cutting a few holes in the fence.” Just as I told you six weeks ago, he added silently, when you first came up with this lame-brained idea.

  “Shit,” The Chairman said from hundreds of miles to the south. “Okay ju ex and ten ah clo steen ...”

  Finnegan cursed under his breath and turned back to his comm officer. The half a dozen other members of the squad stepped away, already aware there was a chewing-out to come and wary of getting any shit splashed on them. “Really?” he hissed. “Really? You can’t even keep a fucking clear, unencrypted radio channel open for five fucking minutes?”

  “This radio’s a piece of shit, Major,” Vasquez said, packing an apology and a defense into a single tone. “I tried to get new parts before we left, but –”

  He was interrupted by a sudden splatter of sparks and a small puff of blue smoke from the radio unit. He jumped away, startled, and Finnegan threw the headset on the table in utter disgust.

  “I give up,” he said. “Yet another fucked up, useless, waste of –”

  The sprinter lunged out of the forest less than five feet away, howling out of the shadows. It collided with Vasquez, ramming him straight in the side and driving him to the ground, burying its bared teeth in his exposed neck and biting, hard and deep.

  The other men in the squad, caught completely unawares, fumbled to bring their guns to bear. Finnegan lunged at the soldier nearest him, Davidson, and decked him with a single roundhouse before he could raise his rifle. “No!” he hissed. “No guns!” He had told them over and over: The noise would not only attract more of the infected; it was guaranteed to alert the Omaha sentries as well. Then, no matter how stupid they were, they would come for them. As the sprinter feasted on Vasquez’ exposed flesh, Finnegan turned to confront the other four men under his command. He pulled his Ka-Bar from its sheath and drew out his truncheon. “Remember your training. Do as you’re told. And remember that the sprinters travel in pa—”

  He never got to finish the sentence. In that instant, three more of the infected rocketed out of the gathering shadows, announced by their breathless, screeching howls, and attacked.

  Davidson went down next, still fumbling with his gear. DeSouza actually got his knife out, plunging it into the lower back of the attacking monster, splitting it open from spine to shoulder blade, but not slowing it by a second. It spun on him, a mouthful of Davidson still between its teeth, and launched itself at the soldier. Finnegan got there first, driving his Ka-Bar straight up, under its chin, through the back of its throat, into its brain. He barely managed to jerk his blade free before DeSouza, thoroughly repulsed, shoved away the dead thing and backed away.

  Finnegan spun to see Michaels actually behaving like a soldier, driving another sprinter back with his truncheon and raising his knife to skewer it in the eye. But he didn’t see the third sprinter coming in front behind him, to the left, and before Finnegan could cross the ten feet to help him the one-time female in the ripped and filthy PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM sweatshirt hit the young soldier so hard it literally popped his jaw off. Blood and teeth flew everywhere, and the sprinter groaned with pleasure as it chewed off the remains of the man’s face. Finnegan finished off the creature with a single, strong strike of the knife into the base of its skull.

  That left two soldiers, Finnegan, and two sprinters – the final one from the forest, a dark-skinned hulk with too many teeth, and the first one, the one who had taken down Vasquez and already eaten most of the best parts.

  Finnegan waved an arm to attract the attention of the two soldiers – Harris and Capstan – and pointed at the unoccupied hulk. They attacked, truncheons up. He slipped past and almost flew through the air, knife up and out, to land on the back of the thing that had killed Vasquez, driving it to the ground and bashing in the base of its skull with the hilt of his Ka-Bar. Even that didn’t quite kill it. It managed to shrug him off, roll over on top of him, blood and bile flying everywhere. The instant before its open mouth took him in the throat, Finnegan slammed the knife into the half-collapsed temple of the creature and it stiffened – twitched – fell.

  Finnegan could hear the grunts and hissing of the other two soldiers as they tried to bring the last sprinter down. He scrambled to his feet as he wiped the blood and spittle from his eyes. There: They had put the creature on its knees, almost severed its legs at the knees, but it still flailed its massive arms, clawing for them, biting and scratching.

  Finnegan circled around behind them, carefully out of range. “Hold him!” he hissed. “Tight!” Capstan and Harris gripped the creature as hard as they could. Finnegan lunged forward, his knife in his fist, and buried it in the base of the infected neck. Again. And again, a third and fatal time.

  It stopped moving. It fell. The other two soldiers backed off, panting like animals, slathered in blood.

  Blood, Finnegan thought. Too much of it. Over the last six months of almost constant combat, he’d developed an instinct for it; a sense of how much was too much.

  Harris looked good. Plenty of gore but no obvious tears in his uniform, very little exposed flesh. Capstan, on the other hand: His tunic was ripped to shreds. There was a deep gash across his chest, left shoulder almost to navel. It was already seeping blood, smeared with dirt and something more.

  Finnegan got up close to him, keeping his voice very low. “Good work, soldier,” he said. The young man relaxed slightly, nodded as he tried to catch his breath. “He get you?”

  “No,” Capstan said, gulping for air. “I mean, yeah, a little, but not—”

  Finnegan pulled his carbine and shot the soldier in the forehead. One shot. Dead.

  Harris, the only surviving member of the squad, gaped at him in disbelief. “I thought you said no guns!” he said, still – admirably, Finnegan thought – trying to keep his voice low.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “We’re gone.” He looked up, checked the position of the sun and shadows. “Ex-fil is half a click that way,” he said, nodding towards the northwest. “Let ‘em come now. All they’ll find is blood and bodies. Fuck it.”

  Harris kept gaping. “But—”

  “Fuck it, I said. This is done. Come on.” Finnegan scooped up his go-pack and left the clearing, abandoning the rest of the supplies and the broken radio. None of it mattered.

  Harris watched him, astonished, for two full heartbeats Then he followed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The speeches were done, but food had come out, and the potluck – complete with live music – was in full swing when Francis Sherman and Anna Demilio slipped away for a walk. They chose to follow the path of the inner perimeter fence near the new Town Hall. They could still hear the happy conversation and the music. It was somehow comforting, even as dusk gathered around them and the shamblers watched and clutched at them, scarcely a hundred yards away.

  “That went well,” she said. It was getting even colder; every word made a puff of silver vapor.

  “It did,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “They’re good people. It’s a good start. But we have a long way to go.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” she said, and smiled at the ground as they walked.

  Sherman scanned the icy terrain, taking note of the slowly sway
ing mass of shamblers. It was getting to be time for another clearance run, just to keep the numbers pressing against the fence as small as possible. But he knew it would never stop. Not until they found a way to eliminate the infected en masse.

  One thing at a time, he told himself. He heard a sudden bark of laughter behind him, back at the party. It made him feel just a little bit better.

  “So how is mass production coming?” he asked. He didn’t have to tell her he was talking about the vaccine. That was almost always the topic.

  Demilio shrugged inside her parka. “Getting there. I’m going to need that big shipment of eggs from New Abraham before we can really get rolling. But I’m still … well, you know this. We’ve talked about it already. The human trials ...”

  He stopped walking and faced her directly. Demilio stopped as well. “I thought that was it. You’re still thinking about the trials. That’s why you actually flinched when I introduced you in there.”

  She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “‘Hero of the Recovery,’ she muttered at the icy ground. “That’s such a lie.” When she looked up, staring into the ruins of unrecovered Omaha, he could see tears standing in her eyes. “Real doctors, good doctors, don’t inject healthy humans with a fatal disease. They don’t try and kill their patients.”

  “You didn’t have any choice, Anna. There was no other way.”

  “There’s always another way. I just didn’t try hard enough.”

  He shook his head. He knew the truth. “You’ve performed miracles, actual miracles, with the tiny amount of equipment and personnel you have here, from the very beginning. And still you think that isn’t enough.”

  She set her jaw. “It isn’t.”

  “It is. The men who were part of the trial were all traitors to begin with, every single one of them an RSA soldier we captured. And they continue to skulk around in the underbrush and try to bring us down.” I just wish we’d caught the assholes who cut the fence today, he thought. It’s still going on, all the time. “And you didn’t force them to do anything. You gave every single one of them a choice.”